In just five months, Nagpur tops new smart city list: Survey

Nagpur/New Delhi: Nagpur, the city with RSS headquarters, has emerged as the topmost smart city in India. In just five months, Nagpur has beaten other cities chosen before it to get the best implementation of smart city plan.

A recent stock-taking exercise conducted by urban development ministry has revealed that Nagpur, though chosen as a smart city in September 2016 much after 33 smart cities in two previous rounds has achieved the best investment conversion ratio. Like all other flagship programmes of Modi government, BJP-ruled states have responded better than others to Smart City Mission. All the top five cities – Nagpur, Indore, Surat, Vadodara and Udaipur –are from BJP-ruled states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Rajasthan. All these cities have achieved an investment conversion ratio (ICR) of 90% and above. ICR indicates the extent of conversion of approved smart city plans into investments through ground level implementation.

Nagpur has reported a remarkable performance with an ICR of 249% having lined up an investment of Rs 2,500 crore as against the Rs 1,002-crore investment proposed in the approved smart city plan for the city, with additional resource mobilization from different sources. It has overtaken 33 cities.

The review however, found that that the seven southern cities announced under the first batch of 20 cities in January 2016 are lagging behind. These include Kochi (Kerala), Visakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh), Davanagere (Karnataka), Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu), Kakinada (Andhra Pradesh), Belagavi (Karnataka) and Chennai (Tamil Nadu).Kakinada has performed better than others with an ICR of 55%.

In all, the first batch of 20 smart cities with a total approved investment of Rs 48,064 crore are set to achieve an ICR of 49% by June this year.